Perhaps an odd question I don’t know… But what does Monchi actually mean, and where does the name come from?
Obvious his actual name is Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo, so it isn’t perhaps immediately apparent from that?
Did anyone ever see him play also? I can’t say I did. I sort of started getting into Spanish football at the end of Unzue’s reign in the Sevilla goal and the only other Goalkeeper I remember for Sevilla from those early years was a Norwegian guy by the name of Frode Olsen.
Not sure about the nickname; this article talks a bit about his game:
It appears that Ramón is a Spanish version of Raymond, and Monchi is an alternative to the name Raymond.
In Spanish “hypocoristic” names are very common. As you said, they are alternative versions of the same name. Two classic examples of this are:
Jose = Pepe
Francisco = Paco
Each one has its own origin, but most of them are formed by splitting the original name and adding some sort of suffix or prefix. In this way, for Ramon, “Moncho” is the most common hypocoristic and it is formed by taking away the first syllabus and adding “cho”. It is not weird to see this same syllabus added to other names (e.g. Juancho, Pancho).
Monchi is just another version exchanging “cho” for “chi”, which sounds more like the south of Spain.
And we have a new winner of the best first post of all time! Welcome to the boards @alebertolet! What a great post and thanks for the information!
Christin’s (my longtime GF) family has about 8 Servandos in their family and each has their own weird nickname. It gets confusing when trying to figure out who someone is talking about unless they use the nickname.